Muna Dajani, Munir Fakher Eldin, and Michael Mason, The Untold Story of the Golan Heights: Occupation, Colonization, and Jawlani Resistance (London: I.B. Tauris, 2022)
[This review was originally published in the Fall 2025 issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]
On the cover of The Untold Story of the Golan Heights is a painting by the Jawlani (Golan) artist Alaa Armoon depicting two women in white headscarves, their backs to the viewer, waving toward a mosque-like structure that is separated from the two figures by a daunting fence. Described by indigenous Jawlanis as Crying Hill, the site is near the Druze village of Majdal Shams and marks the UN “purple line” between Syria in the distance and the Israeli-occupied Golan (al-Jawlan) in the foreground. Crying Hill reflects the sadness of a people separated by a hardened border who can only wave to relatives and friends on the other side of the line.
In many ways, al-Jawlan is what the editors of this impressive volume describe as an untold story, but given the recent onslaught by the Israeli military beyond the line of control, the appearance of this book is especially timely. This region, however, also caught the world’s attention six months earlier on 27 July 2024 when news of an errant missile, no doubt fired by one of the two belligerents in the area—Hizballah or Israel—landed in a soccer field in Majdal Shams, killing twelve Druze schoolchildren. When Israeli officials went to the site, supposedly to offer condolences to the families of the fallen but also to emphasize Israel’s status as the victim of this tragedy, the Druze community there heckled them and told them to go back to Tel Aviv. The Untold Story enables readers to understand that the origins of this contentious scene in Majdal Shams date back much earlier to the June 1967 War.
During that war, Israel dealt a crushing military defeat to the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and, contrary to provisions of the 1949 Geneva Convention, proceeded to occupy and annex areas formerly controlled by these three Arab states. While the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza is well covered in both scholarly and popular literature, Israel’s relationship to al-Jawlan is far less familiar, with arguably “the only scholarly book in English” on the territory being a slim volume “by Israeli author Yigal Kipnes” (4).
It is this knowledge gap to which editors Muna Dajani, Munir Fakher Eldin, and Michael Mason have responded with an invaluable resource for understanding a region sadly relegated to the sidelines of Middle East studies. The volume consists of five thematic sections, each anchored by a single chapter, along with one or two commentaries labeled as “Reflections,” interspersed with poems by the Jawlani poet, Yasser Khanjar. The five themes consist of: the everyday mechanics of Israeli occupation; resistance politics of the Jawlani people; the politics of Jawlani art; the politics of youth and education; and the Jawlani agro-ecological landscape. From these five themes emerges a narrative with two basic threads: the instruments and processes of everyday colonization and domination, and the broad outlines of the resistance politics of the colonized.
The historical context of this narrative is covered in an excellent introductory chapter that begins the story of al-Jawlan in 1967, when Israel forcibly displaced and expelled 127,000 Jawlani residents, representing about ninety-five percent of the local population. In a reprise of what occurred after the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, the Israeli state then systematically demolished the depopulated villages in al-Jawlan. The small number of the region’s indigenous inhabitants who managed to remain were clustered in five mostly Druze villages on the southeastern slopes of Jabal al-Shaykh and the Alawite village of Ghajar, located to the west near the Lebanese border. In 1969, the Israeli military demolished one of the five Druze villages, Sahita, but the other four have survived, along with Ghajar. As of 2020, these villages had 26,000 residents. Thus, in the years since 1967, Israel followed a prescription that it had developed since 1948 of military conquest, forced displacement, and resettlement of its own civilians in the spaces of the conquered territories. Like the map of Israel that emerged from 1948–67, the map of al-Jawlan today reveals thirty-four Israeli settlements with roughly 26,250 Israeli civilian-settlers dispersed throughout a region of depopulated and demolished Syrian Arab villages.
An informative series of maps in the volume’s introduction tells this story cartographically. As the editors point out, Israel has followed a pattern of colonization in al-Jawlan that parallels what it did inside Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Israel’s conquest of the region also resonates with the actions of other settler societies insofar as its colonial regime is predicated on control of land.
In this occupied and now annexed territorial space, the State of Israel has implemented a regime of “spatial Judaization” (10), much like in other areas that it has conquered and colonized, including the State of Israel itself. The aim of Israeli Judaization is the deliberate demographic and cultural transformation of the space to reflect a project of Jewish domination on the land. The Untold Story identifies the everyday techniques of domination over al-Jawlan, described in the chapter on “Lifeworld Colonization” (23–41). The authors and contributors draw from an impressive range of theoretical literature on settler colonialism, including work by Patrick Wolfe, Ghazi Walid Falah, Rana Barakat, Oren Yiftachel, James Scott, Lorenzo Veracini, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Mahmood Mamdani, and many others, to enhance descriptions of these quotidian instruments of subjugation. Added to this list is a substantial bibliography of sources, published by the Arab Human Rights Center in al-Jawlan, known as al-Marsad, that are likely to be less well known to most readers.
Despite the unbridled power exercised by Israel over the indigenous Jawlani communities, the resistance of the latter is the primary theme running through the volume. Undoubtedly, the seminal event in this context is the six-month general strike in 1982 against the 1981 Golan Law to annex the region and force the indigenous inhabitants to accept Israeli citizenship. Nevertheless, as the editors and contributors emphasize, resistance is not limited to such highly visible protests. Jawlanis have embraced the Palestinian idea of steadfastness (sumud) as a daily way of resisting both cultural and administrative Judaization while protecting their own identity and defending their land from confiscation.
The theoretically rich chapter on the semiotics of identity focuses on the dynamic interplay of Israeli efforts to shape a new Israeli Druze identity with the efforts of Jawlani Druze to maintain their culture in the face of an adversary bent on erasing it. Annexation brought an entirely different and arguably more difficult field of struggle for the Jawlanis in maintaining their identity and culture than in the occupied regimes in Palestine. Nevertheless, Jawlanis have forged pathways for resisting their Israeli colonial masters. A fascinating chapter on Jawlani sculpture explores how this medium has enabled the people of the region to contest Judaization by reaffirming their identity in those places where sculpture is deployed. One of the most formidable instruments enlisted by Israel is in the field of education, where there is a constant assault on the Jawlani memory in curricula and textbooks, alongside direct censorship of Druze writers known for Arab nationalism. The final chapter of the book is a compelling and even beguiling “agro-ecological” study of the interplay of the natural environment and the processes of colonization, settlement, and resistance (162). The chapter points out how restrictions on Jawlani farmers redirected crops away from Damascus to Haifa and Tel Aviv, while the establishment of “nature reserves” reflects Israeli efforts at confiscating land and isolating Jawlani communities. Israel has frequently used such techniques elsewhere. But the authors of this chapter remind readers, by reference to authors such as Fernand Braudel and Ibn Khaldun, that hill populations everywhere, including the Jawlanis, have forged creative ways of resisting authority and maintaining their economic and cultural autonomy in the face of formidable adversity.
The Untold Story is the result of a unique research collaboration involving Birzeit University in the West Bank, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and al-Marsad, in which Jawlani and Palestinian researchers constitute the study’s core knowledge producers. This collaborative research approach forms what the editors and contributors describe as the anthology’s “decolonizing research strategy and pedagogy” (13). Equally innovative is the participation of students from Birzeit and al-Jawlan itself, who carried out some of the research for the book and wrote several of the reflections at the ends of the chapters.
Organized in this way, The Untold Story seeks in its conclusion to project a “counter-geography” of the Jawlan; a map of representations and visions that challenge the notion of an Israeli cartography of domination and subjugation (194). For too long, the editors write, Jawlanis have been written out of their own history and geography. In an effort to remedy this problem, The Untold Story takes bold steps in forging a vision of Jawlani autonomy and fixing what is long overdue. As expressed eloquently in the poem entitled “Tranquility” by Yasser Khanjar (119):
I continue to sow the seeds of questions
In the bowels of this despondency,
At the joints of the fractures, I plant them
And proceed to the dream that I was waiting for . . .
There, the door has opened
Here I pass.